Overlooking the coast: Limited local planning for coastal area management along Michigan’s Great Lakes

This paper presents an evaluation of local efforts to manage Great Lakes coastal shorelands through master plans, focusing on Michigan localities. We framed the analysis around the concepts of capacity, knowledge, and commitment. We conducted plan content evaluations, structured surveys of local officials, and multiple unstructured interviews of local officials and citizens through a participatory action research (PAR) program. We analyzed those data, along with census data, using descriptive statistics, correlations, regression analyses, and triangulation of observations. We found that Michigan’s coastal localities are largely failing to consider their coastal areas in their planning, or to adopt meaningful plan policies to manage them, for at least four reasons: damaging erosion and storm events have been relatively infrequent; localities rely on the state to address coastal issues; insurance programs effectively indemnify them when a storm does happen; and—to some extent—shoreland owners push back against proactive local management. To the extent localities are planning, higher overall plan quality is associated with having in-house planning staff (a measure of both capacity and knowledge) and development pressure (knowledge and commitment). To the extent plans address their coastal areas specifically, the adoption of plan policies advancing coastal area management is associated directly with having higher median house values (capacity), in-house planning staff (capacity and knowledge), and development pressure (knowledge and commitment). Focus on coastal management is inversely associated, however, with the use of planning consultants. Higher plan quality is correlated significantly with the adoption of more robust plan policies overall. In sum, having knowledge about coastal dynamics appears important in explaining local planning efforts, but having the capacity to act on that knowledge and the commitment to do so are equally or more important.